The Therapist Gamer

From the creators of Dead Nation (and Resogun, Super Stardust, Matterfall, and Nex Machina) comes Aleination.  It plays a lot like Dead Nation, which is to say that it's a tactical twin-stick shooter with cooperative play.  You can pick one of three classes to battle an invading alien horde, and you earn experience, new powers, and new weapons along the way.  There are a few different weapon types for each character to use, but the weapon drop system is randomized, like in Diablo or Borderlands, so you are constantly on the lookout for better firepower.

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Unlike the frantic Resogun and Nex Machina, Alienation requires a more considered and thoughtful gameplay response, but it would be inaccurate to say it's slow paced.  There are bursts of action and, if desired, there's time for exploration.  There's some incentive to explore in order to gain XP and better weapons, but unless you have the difficulty cranked up you don't really need to explore beyond the set objectives.  There are respawn points throughout each map and you get infinite lives, but your XP multiplier will increase the longer you play without dying.

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The guns come in different rarities and you're more likely to find rare guns if you play on a higher difficulty.  I thought this was balanced well and it incentivized me to play the game on the highest difficulty I could manage because I wanted more XP and increased odds at better guns.  When things got way too intense then I could easily turn the difficulty down and try again.  I like that there isn't really a penalty for choosing easier difficulties, but rather you're incentivized by the gameplay mechanics themselves to challenge yourself.

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All in all I think Alienation is a good game, but some of the game design choices just didn't gel with me and I think they really got in the way of me enjoying the game more.  The two main flaws both have to do with pacing: the reload mechanic is unwise for the gameplay, and enemies leaving behind harmful toxins just slows things down too much.  Allow me to address both:

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To reload you push in the right joystick and a horizontal bar appears that indicates you're reloading.  There's a sweet spot in the middle of the bar where you're supposed to click again to finish the reload.  If you mistime the click then it takes longer to reload your weapon.  This mechanic has been in a few games but honestly I just don't like it, especially in Alienation.  As I said, my main issue is with the pacing.  Some of the guns in the game fire so fast they empty their clip in about one or two seconds.  The reloading takes around 3 seconds for the full reload action, and half that time if you time the button click properly.  So you fire for about one second and then reload for 2-3 seconds, with the pressure to try to time your reload properly.  FIRE!  click . . . click.  FIRE!  click . . . click.  FIRE!  click . . . click.  FIRE!  click . .click dang it I mistimed the click!  It's just so frickin' tedious and it totally cuts into the flow of the game.  Not to mention that the reload button is mapped to clicking in the right joystick (R3), which most people will sometimes accidentally press as they're aiming their weapon.  I'm not sure what they should have done to address this without compromising the balance of the game, but I have a couple of ideas.  The first is that the clip sizes for automatic weapons should just be way bigger - even if it means averaging the damage output to be lower, it would be worth it to avoid reloading so dang often.  I honestly felt like I was reloading my guns more often than shooting them.  After hours of playing I starting getting "legendary" weapons with larger clip sizes and it did feel rewarding to get them, but that sense of reward came at too high a cost - you shouldn't design a part of your game to be tedious just so you can reward the player with a relief from the tedium.  Another way they could have addressed this issue would be to just make the reload speeds much faster.  Ideally, this reload mechanic makes the player feel rewarded for timing the reload properly, but the missed reloads take so long that it feels less like a reward if you time it right and more like a punishment if you time it wrong.  

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The other issue I have with alienation is that certain enemies leave behind toxic sludge when they die and you take heavy damage if you walk over it.  It disappears after five seconds or so, but it's just unnecessary and cuts into the flow of the game.  Very often, you will be in a hallway and you'll shoot these bug-like aliens that create sludge when they die, and then you just have to wait for the sludge to disappear before you inch forward and kill a few more bugs which spawn some more sludge.  Again, it's just tedious.  I think they introduced this mechanic (and the reload mechanic) to give them game a slower, more thoughtful pace, but in my opinion it slows things down too much and is at odds with the rest of the gameplay.  While it can be tense to have to reload when being pursued by hordes of aliens, shooting for one second and reloading for three seconds is less tense than it is frustrating.

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Both flaws I mentioned impact the game more at the start than later on, so unfortunately some players may give up on the game before they experience all it has to offer.  For example, the legendary weapons feel really empowering and it's exciting to find them and try them out; I found a shotgun that also shot grenades and it totally changed the way I approached certain enemies.  Playing the later stages on a higher difficulty can really stretch your tactics and force you to try new things.  And playing co-op is fun and well implemented.  It's too bad that a couple of flaws keep this game from truly standing out.